I realise I should have declared a special interest in this topic in that my father was one of the civil servants who packed his bags on 15 August 1947 and left India where he had lived and worked for the previous thirteen years, never to return, except for a brief visit in the 1970s. He was phelgmatic about the end of British rule, as he was about most things in life, as he had known that one of his prime responsibilities as a civil servant, from the time that he joined the Indian Civil Service in 1934, having leaned Bengali as well as something about Indian history and law’ before travelling out, was the benign transfer of power, and was not a whisky swilling imperialist, but an excessively conscientious, highly upright, legal minded, New Statesman reading, colonial administrator, as were the other former members of the ICS who I met in my youth.
| Charles | Saumarez | Smith | 
It will be another 70 years at least before an objective and dispassionate analysis can be made of the legacy of Empire in India (and elsewhere) and of Partition. The Indian historian/biographer Zareer Masani wrote an interesting article about Partition a few years ago. He also published a comment on the anniversary of Independence in the Telegraph yesterday. See links below:
https://www.outlookindia.com/magazine/story/what-if-attlee-hadnt-partitioned-india/287314
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/08/14/enough-post-colonial-self-loathing-partition-nehrus-fault-not/
Dear Adam, Thank you for posting these links. I found the long article (and another of his in The Wire which I found online) very interesting, not least because two of his uncles were in the ICS. Charles
I had no idea about your father’s past. That makes Andrew Motion’s INDEPENDENCE all the more relevant.
What worries me is that after another 70 years people like your father will have been written out of history. A lot of my relations were in the army and civil service in India, but the generation before your father, and I believe they too were doing their best in those unenlightened times.
Having done a bit of research, I’m not so worried about this as I’ve discovered that they were all (at least the civil servants were) pretty interested in documenting their history, so it’s all well recorded. Charles